396
DAVID ZANE MAIROWITZ
She leans to the stone wall to get her breath. The pain in her
loins has brought her to the edge of fire. He is right. She will not
be
able to kill because she is asleep. This pounding fact has opened a
chasm before her and she is falling in it. Against her will, the tears
have burst from her. She has never known such pain, even at the
worst of her bleedings. His contempt is redoubled as he conceives she
has collapsed to her knees in cowardice. Again she fails him, his bride
of Frankenstein, gone the female route to passivity.
The pain has swollen to a knot, but she grips her knife in anti–
cipation. Kropotkin feels a nerve of deep embarrassment tingle up his
'
back and then subside. He wishes his feelings at this moment were
I
something more powerful, but he has dried to the combat. He re–
calls a time, perhaps in another life, when he had threatened to kill
II
her and, in self-defense, she took him in her mouth. He remembers
waves of retribution and resentment giving way to the desperate
ecstasy of his blast and how, in that rush, he had accepted his own
instinct to murder. What had torn and racked his youth and sleep, a
throbbing resentment of his life, now shattered in a thrill. And it was
Perfidia's pitiful secondhand humanity whieh had yielded up
his
secret. She knew every corner of him and the emptiness of her
presence in his shade became a crisis for him.
And now the despair returns as he witnesses the further evidence
of her mutilation. He cannot retract a shred of it. Despite her fury,
he disarms her and pins her fast. He sees he has failed to ravage an
already shopworn article and he can never again imagine his body
holding dominion over this corpse. Up close, he sees that she sees
his
eyes leaping at her, but that the suffering there fails to ignite her.
It
is,
for him, because she has learned nothing. He wants to leave a
kiss
here, but this is not the face for it.
The cold military eyes of the doctor force her to a cruel at–
tention here in the halls of the clinic where she has staggered in tor–
ment. He studies the results of the tests in which she has been scraped,
smeared, probed, watered. She begs for a sedative, he tells her she
must wait. She is near fainting now and wonders at her task, just
over twenty-four hours ahead. She must manage to return before her
emissary arrives, to avoid suspicion and not put the project in jeo–
pardy.
